I just installed a new Maxtor 40 GB ATA drive, using their MaxBlast 3 software, with the intention of substituting it for an older, working drive.

My old drive has several partions (5), including a dual boot Win98 and Win2000. I used Partion Magic and Boot Magic in setting up my original drive and it works fine, allowing me to use either boot partion. I used Maxtor's MaxBlast installation to create a new boot drive, which seemed to work without a hitch, creating the right number of partitions and copying files. However, when I switched cables and attempted to boot from my new drive, it said there was no O/S. I called Maxtor tech support, and got a big fat goose egg there ... "We don't support dual boot with MaxBlast" ... and they claim I have to use some other copy utility to clone the drive.

I switched cables back to the old drive and re-booted to the default O/S, Win2000. That worked fine and I see four of the five volumes (partitions) that MaxBlast created on the new drive but the visible C drive partition is the Win98 one. That doesn't surprise me too much, since Win98 was my original system and I guess MaxBlast also makes that assumption. I'll probably try making Boot Magic set W98 as the default and disable the dual boot and try again, but beyond that, I'm not sure what to do.

If anyone has some first hand experience with this situation or some ideas, please contact me.
Thanks

Perplexed

I think you are missing a bootable Master boot record and or boot sector from the active marked primary partition on the new disk.



//it is your intention to use the new drive as the operating systems disk??

then migrate all operating systems from old disk to new one using drive image.

Do you have drive image? If you do, shut your machine down, make the new drive master as you intend to, boot from a win9x boot diskette and run drive image and copy over the partitions disk to disk each in turn, stopping to make an extended partition in exactly the same place if required.

i.e.

disk copy windows 98 partition to windows 98 partition.
next was extended partition, so go into partition magic and make it, reboot, etc
boot again from windows 98 boot disk,
disk copy windows 2000 partition (being the next partition on the old disk to restore, etc)....
continue to finished.

I hope that that make sense.

This is probably the most simple way to get things working.

Problem is, i am not too clear on your end goal. It is your hope to use the new disk as a replacement OS disk (as discussed above) or as a data drive?

Phantasm66

Thanks for the input. I suspect you're right about "missing a bootable Master boot record and or boot sector". And yes, I am planning "to use the new drive as the operating systems disk".

I have PowerQuest's Drive Copy 3.0. I've never used it but the instructions seem to say it will do what you suggest. I was hoping to avoid having to make a partition by partion copy and Maxtor's MaxBlast software seemed to do just that ... ie, it formated and created the correct number of partitions on the new drive, then copied files across from the old disk in one continuous process. Like I said in my original post, when I boot from the old disk and view the new drive's contents, the partition holding Win98 is visible, but I think it is just an ordinary data partition. Is there some simple way to repair it to become a bootable partition?

Thanks again

the only problem you may run into (with drive image) is that if you don't put the extended partition back in the same place, then the information in the bootloader program's (like NT bootloader, or Boot Magic) settings file can be wrong (i.e. problem in boot.ini , etc). That's why I suggest looking in partition magic first to see where the extended partition is, and to create that again on the new disk at the proper time - i.e. if its the second partition, then restore first image, go to partition magic and make the extended, then back into drive image to restore remaining images.

trying to do a drive image restore type operation by copying files with windows explorer might well work with windows 98 or something, but I think you are pushing your luck with windows 2000 or XP. The really best way to migrate operating systems from one hard drive to another with the minimum of annoyance is to use Drive Image.

Always, during these kinds of operations, ensure that you never loose the ability to boot into a DOS prompt (you will always need a bootable CD or floppy) and never loose access to ANY of the tools you will potentially need.

Once you have duplicated your partition layout on the new disk, and restored all images, and everything is working, you would be free to format the old disk, and perhaps use it for mp3s or something, however I urge the use of a dedicated partition for drive images, allowing you to keep a snapshot of various system states....

Got it working

Phantasm66

After struggling for a day and a half with the Maxtor software, I gave up and bought Copy Commander which did the job perfectly, without problem. Everything now works but there's a couple of weird things occuring.

Both my drives are connected at the ends of their individual cables to a Promise ATA controller card, without any other device on the cables. When the system boots, the original drive showed up as D0 and the new drive as D3. When I finished the copy, I hid the O/S partions on the old drive and simply swapped the cables at the controller end. I expected the new drive would become D0 and the old D3 (eg, assuming that the cables are identical, from the controller's standpoint, all that happened was that the drives at the ends of the cables were changed). Instead, the new drive shows up as D1 and the old as D2. I thought that the only thing that determined the channel designation was the physical location of the connector on the card and the postition of the drive on the cable, so I'm at a loss to understand this.

The second strange thing that is happening on my new Win2K, is the swap file magically moved itself. I used control panel/system to move my swap file to a data partition (J:\) on my old drive and according to both control panel/system and disk manager, the swap file is on J:\. However, when I do a search for win386.swp, it shows up in a data partition (G:\) of my new drive.

I'd appreciate any insight you might have into what's happening here.

Thanks
Jack

If you search the entire system, you do get 2 instances of the swap file now? If so, try deleting the old one (if its not being used, then it will let you).

Yeah, I already checked - there are no other instances. In fact, after I made the original change, the only instance showed where I expected it (on the old drive partition J:\). When I checked again the next day, it had moved to new G:\, although system and disk mgr both say it's on J:\ ...

Also, any ideas regarding the first issue of controller channel numbers?